


Coddle

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Series: Kinkmas MMXV [4]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Dom/sub, F/M, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Punishment, Subspace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-13 12:30:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5708191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kinkmas IV. Want and need are very different things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coddle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [breathtaken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathtaken/gifts).



Knees together, thighs apart.

_Mother of God, I can’t._

_Yes, you can._

_I_ can’t _._

 _You_ can _._

This is her best dress, and these are her best shoes. She concentrates on walking with her knees together and her thighs apart, on doing as she was told. Her heart speeds like a rabbit’s heart before its neck is snapped. Her thoughts are in snarls, gathered in thick curls like her hair above her flushed cheeks.

D’Artagnan sees her first, smiling hopefully as she approaches the table. She becomes a bird for an instant, and flies an inch or so above her own feet, but she’s angry with him for kissing Lucie de Foix, and she’s angry with herself for staying with Bonacieux, so Constance presses her lips together. His smile can do for them both.

“Have you come to see me?”

“Actually –” She swallows. “I came for Athos.”

He raises himself with an expression of enquiry, her friend, her _dear_ friend, the palms of his hands braced on the table. “Constance?” Those hands look capable, she thinks. She can trust those hands.

“In private?”

“Of course.” And no one pays them any heed as he leads her into the silent stable, where the reek of dung and horse sweat completely fails to cover the odours of man, and musk, and leather. It’s that especially which makes her shiver; it’s the soft cracking sound she hears in her mind when she risks a glance at the whips on the walls, coiled on their hooks, oiled and waiting. What chastises a horse would flay a man, a woman, a girl – but she must look at him, only at him, and do as she was told.

“Well?” He’s left a goodly space between them, a polite amount of space. She is Madame Bonacieux, but more, she is d’Artagnan’s, and still more, what matters most is that she is not his. His eyes are elsewhere, always glancing behind him. Constance can’t see the leash, only the elegant hand which holds it, but she knows it’s there.

“I need you to do it again.” Her voice is low-pitched, trembling, her teeth clamping down on her tongue in an attempt to keep her sacred, sane. Her knees are pressed so tightly together that the ache runs up her legs. Her thighs are wet with sweat. “ _Please_.”

Immediately, he turns to stone. “No.”

“Athos, please –”

“ _No_.”

To granite.

“I’m begging you –”

“You may do as you please, but my answer will be the same.”

To marble.

“I need –”

“You don’t need it, you want it, and you fail to grasp the difference.”

To ice.

She wasn’t unhappy, not really – just unfulfilled. She wished at times that Bonacieux _would_ beat her, would break with her, would give her a reason to run away and be some other woman, some other man’s wife. She longed for a license to tumble down into ruin, and freedom, or a respectable kind of ruin which would give her some measure of freedom and fill her cup up halfway, sate her for the meantime. Athos was little more than a drunk then, crumpled in her doorway when his legs gave out because she never kicked. She wonders if he could smell it on her. She wonders that he could smell anything through the wine fumes.

“I can help.” He pierced her through with something, bloodshot and rough-jawed and tousled, blunt and well-spoken and neither Roman nor Grecian nor handsome nor ordinary, in the ordinary way.

“How could _you_ ,” she’d asked, not meaning it how it sounded. “Help _me_?”

Kneeling in the corner, naked, knees dented and chilled by the cold flags, she understood. With each hour that passed, she understood a little better. With each imperceptible rub of her thighs together, before he told her how she was to stand, she understood. She was licensed. She went to a beautiful rose-coloured place inside herself where there was nothing but the sound of his voice, the painless blows across the back of her neck and her warm, stinging buttocks when she tried to move, tried to speak, tried to be. How could she be, when she was nothing? When she was the sound of his voice, and his reprimands, when she was safe inside that place inside? There was nothing like it. There _is_ nothing like it. There is nothing in the world like his command.

Her thighs are wet with sweat, and more.

Her cotton-tailed mouth is dry.

“ _Master_ ,” she whispers, panting to be punished.


End file.
